i L i n d . n e t

Speaking of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government, the Star-Bulletin assisted the illusion yesterday with its headline, “Hawaiian officials return to palace“. Officials? Shouldn’t the S-B regularly signal that it is at least somewhat skeptical of the claims made by this group?

If you happened to follow the flap at the end of the legislative session over amendments to an ethics bill that would have blocked Rep. Josh Green from continuing to serve as a physician, details of his new contract with the Hawaii Health Systems Corporation and Ka’u Hospital have been posted by the State Ethics Commission. Green will be paid no more than $68,000 for on-call emergency room services with a one-year contract that runs from May 24, 2008 to May 23, 2009.

Here’s the provision in the ethics law regarding such contracts:

§84-15 Contracts. (a) A state agency shall not enter into any contract to procure or dispose of goods or services, or for construction, with a legislator, an employee, or a business in which a legislator or an employee has a controlling interest, involving services or property of a value in excess of $10,000 unless:

1. The contract is awarded by competitive sealed bidding pursuant to section 103D-302;
2. The contract is awarded by competitive sealed proposal pursuant to section 103D-303; or
3. The agency posts a notice of its intent to award the contract and files a copy of the notice with the state ethics commission at least ten days before the contract is awarded.

Life of the Land’s Henry Curtis makes a very good point about the Catch-22 sunshine situation at the Public Utilities Commission. The commission has elaborate rules providing interested parties the legal right to intervene in PUC cases, but it turns out that notice of new cases is sadly lacking.

“Each month the PUC opens between 20 and 50 new regulatory proceedings a.k.a. dockets on transportation, water, electricity, gas, sewerage, and telecommunications,” Curtis writes. “The public has 20 days to file a Motion to Intervene from the date that the docket is opened.”

The problem is that no information about newly filed cases is regularly available within that 20-day window, meaning that “sunshine” doesn’t exist and the legal right to intervene becomes meaningless. Curtis provides specifics about information becoming available only after the 20-day period has lapsed.

If the situation is really as bad as Henry spells out in some detail, it’s quite an embarrassment for the commission and the state.

The Hawaii State Judiciary has been having trouble with their computer system, again. If you tried to access court records earlier this month, the system was unavailable. This is the notice now on the Judiciary web site.

Between April 30, 2008 to May 5, 2008, the Ho’ohiki system for court records was down. The cause of the problem was an old, fauly server which crashed. The problem was fixed by re-routing access through an alternate server. We apologize for the time it took to do so.
The Judiciary is attempting to improve the overall reliability of the Ho’ohiki system and will be introducing a new server to support it. This work should be completed by the end of the month.
Your understanding and patience is appreciated.

I recall that the Judiciary tried to move to a system that provided scanned images of court documents, but the system didn’t work and the contract was cancelled. I wonder whether they’ll ever try again.

Meanwhile, the trade winds picked up a bit this morning, clearing out most of the vog.

But while the weather is beautiful, we could use some of those crummy, rainy days. It’s been seriously dry for too long.